The Doctor takes Ace back to 1883, to a house called Gabriel Chase she
burned down in the present day. In the 19th century, Gabriel Chase is
the home of amateur scientist Josiah Smith, who is conducting research
into evolution against the wishes of the Church. But Smith is really an
alien who has spent millennia adapting to humanity, and now intends to
assassinate Queen Victoria and seize the British throne. Meanwhile,
buried in the basement is Smith's former master -- a powerful entity who
intends to halt all evolution on Earth.

Production

A longtime fan of Doctor Who, Marc Platt had been trying to write
for the programme since late 1975, when he submitted the Gallifrey-set
storyline “Fires Of The Starmind” on spec. Script editor
Robert Holmes rejected the proposal, but saw potential in Platt and
encouraged him to keep writing. Platt kept in touch with the Doctor
Who production office, discussing various ideas with script editor
Christopher H Bidmead in late 1980, and in 1983 he and fellow fan Jeremy
Bentham submitted the Sontaran adventure “Warmongers”. A
year later, Platt tried again with the complex “Cat's
Cradle”; a reworked version of this storyline, offered to the
production office in 1987, brought him into contact with new Doctor
Who script editor Andrew Cartmel. By this time, Platt was working in
BBC administration cataloguing radio programmes, after leaving the
catering industry.

Cartmel admired “Cat's Cradle”, but felt that it was too
ambitious for the limited Doctor Who budget. Soon, though, Platt
began meeting with Cartmel and writer Ben Aaronovitch, who was developing
Remembrance Of The Daleks for Season
Twenty-Five. With their assistance, he developed a Russian period piece
called “Shrine” in late 1987, and then another idea set on
Gallifrey entitled “Lungbarrow” during 1988. This would see
the Doctor facing his greatest fears by confronting his bizarre cousins in
their ancestral home of Lungbarrow. It would also further develop
Cartmel's ideas about the Doctor's background by revealing a genetic link
between the Doctor and the Other, a shadowy figure from ancient Time Lord
history.

John Nathan-Turner was concerned that Lungbarrow revealed too much about the Doctor, too
quickly

Producer John Nathan-Turner, however, was concerned that
“Lungbarrow” revealed too much about the Doctor, too quickly.
While he liked the setting of a creepy old house and its weird denizens --
inspired by Mervyn Peake's 1950 fantasy novel Gormenghast -- he did
not want the Gallifreyan elements retained. Platt agreed to rework his
storyline, relocating the mansion house to Victorian England and shifting
the focus from the Doctor's greatest fears to Ace's. Some elements of
“Lungbarrow” were reimagined for the new setting; for
instance Mackenzie, the policeman in suspended animation had originally
been a character trapped in a transporter for three centuries, while
Redvers Fenn-Cooper's invitation to Buckingham Palace had earlier been a
will for which characters were vying in “Lungbarrow”.
Cartmel also suggested making evolution a theme of the piece, while
Platt's BBC duties inspired Light's mission to document all forms of
life on Earth.

During the autumn of 1988, Platt prepared a revised storyline entitled
“The Bestiary”. This was now intended to be the three-part,
studio-only story for Season Twenty-Six, and so Platt ensured that it took
place entirely within the walls of Gabriel Chase. Although he liked the
way “Lungbarrow” had been transformed, Nathan-Turner was
unhappy with the title. Platt briefly referred to his storyline as the
facetious “Not The Bestiary”, before it became “Life
Cycle” when the scripts were commissioned on November 16th.

Platt drew heavily on Victorian literature as inspiration for “Life
Cycle”. Light was derived from the angels in the works of William
Blake (and Platt at one point hoped that the character could have wings,
until this was deemed unfeasible). Control's evolution into a
“ladylike” was an accelerated version of Eliza Doolittle's
social metamorphosis in the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play
Pygmalion. Mrs Grose was a lift from another haunted house story:
Henry James' 1898 novel The Turn Of The Screw. Gwendoline was
originally called Maud, after the character Maud Ruthyn in the 1864
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu novel Uncle Silas; the name had to be
changed due to a BBC adaptation of the book (as The Dark Angel)
set to air around the same time. Gwendoline was the name of Platt's
mother; similarly, his father was called Ernest and his grandfather
Josiah. Redvers Fenn-Cooper was based on H Rider Haggard's classic
adventurer Allan Quatermain, who debuted in King Solomon's Mines
(1885). The character's name was an homage to James Fenimore Cooper,
author of the 1826 novel The Last Of The Mohicans. In the
Bible, Nimrod was a renowned hunter and the great-grandson of
Noah.

The husks were a response to John Nathan-Turner's
preference for a traditional Doctor Who
monster

As “Life Cycle” developed, Nathan-Turner became concerned at
the lack of a traditional Doctor Who monster. In response, Platt
devised the husks in the basement, which represented Josiah's earlier
evolutionary forms. Originally, he envisioned an army of the creatures,
before the numbers were trimmed to three and then just two (omitting a
fish-man husk). It was hoped that the faces of the reptilian and
insectoid husks might incorporate echoes of Josiah's human features. At
a late stage, Platt considered changing “Josiah Samuel
Smith” to “Josiah Solomon Smith”, to avoid any
potential issue with the Samuel Smith Brewery company from whom he had
borrowed the name in the first place.

In April 1989, the adventure's title became Ghost Light. It was
planned to be the third story of Season Twenty-Six, but in June, it was
interchanged with the intended second story, The
Curse Of Fenric, because Nathan-Turner wanted the latter to air
around Hallowe'en. Unfortunately, this undermined a premonition of
Ghost Light which had been incorporated into The Curse Of Fenric. Here, Ace first alluded
to having once burned down a creepy old house, the implication being that
the Doctor subsequently decides to bring her to that house in the past
to face whatever had scared her there. Ghost Light was designated
Serial 7Q, to be made in tandem with Survival
by director Alan Wareing.

Wareing's first order of business for Ghost Light was to record
establishing shots of Gabriel Chase at Stanton Court in Weymouth, Dorset
on June 21st. The initial studio block was then held in BBC Television
Centre Studio 3 on Tuesday, July 18th and Wednesday the 19th. The main
focus on both days was material in the trophy room and the upper and lower
observatories. Some scenes in the access tunnel, the lift and the study
were also taped on the 19th, but Wareing fell badly behind schedule. As
a result, several sequences in the study were either dropped altogether
(such as Nimrod tendering his resignation) or relocated to other sets.
Amongst the latter was Mackenzie being chased by a machete-wielding night
maid (explaining his hurry when he has his fateful encounter with Light),
which was moved to the hallway only to be dropped in editing.

The final studio session for Season Twenty-Six ran for three days
beginning on Tuesday, August 1st. Again, the venue was TC3. Of principal
concern throughout were the hallways, the drawing room, the dining room,
and the empty bedroom where Fenn-Cooper is held. More lift
scenes were recorded on the first two days, as well as those in
Gwendoline's bedroom on the last. It was McCoy's idea to change the
Doctor's closing line from “That's my girl!” to
“Wicked.”

It was Sylvester McCoy's idea to change the Doctor's
closing line from “That's my girl!” to
“Wicked.”

By the time production ended on Doctor Who's twenty-sixth season,
rumours were already rampant that the programme was about to be cancelled.
Matters were by no means improved when the new run of episodes premiered
on September 6th with Battlefield part one,
which earned historically low viewing figures. It quickly became clear
that Season Twenty-Seven would, at the very least, face a lengthy
postponement and so, on September 11th, Nathan-Turner had the unenviable
task of informing Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred that their contract
options were not being taken up.

As a result, Ghost Light was Aldred's final appearance in televised
Doctor Who, with the exception of a brief return for the
thirtieth-anniversary special Dimensions In
Time. Aldred went on to a successful career as a presenter for
children's television and as a voice-over artiste, with her credits
including Melvin & Maureen's Musicagrams, Noddy In Toyland
and Tree Fu Tom. During the Nineties, she appeared in a variety of
unofficial Doctor Who spinoff videos for BBV. Aldred reprised the
role of Ace for a 1990 episode of the educational programme Search Out
Science, the BBC's 2001 online audio play Death Comes To Time,
and regularly for Big Finish Productions beginning with The
Fearmonger in 2000. With Mike Tucker, she wrote the 1996 book Ace!:
The Inside Story Of The End Of An Era.

Marc Platt had been a candidate to write a story for Season
Twenty-Seven, bringing back the Ice Warriors and chronicling Ace's
departure; instead, Ghost Light would be his only televised
script. Platt novelised both Ghost Light and Aaronovitch's Battlefield for Target Books. He then
transformed his rejected “Cat's Cradle” and
“Lungbarrow” storylines into novels for Virgin Publishing's
Doctor Who: The New Adventures range. He also scripted the
unofficial spin-off Downtime for Reeltime Pictures in 1995, which
he subsequently novelised as part of Virgin's Doctor Who: The Missing
Adventures line. Platt then became a prolific contributor to Big
Finish's audio adventure strands, starting with Loups-Garoux in
2001. His second Doctor Who audio play, the Cyberman origin story
Spare Parts, became the basis for the 2006 television adventure Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of
Steel.

Alan Wareing continued to have a busy career after the apparent demise of
Doctor Who, becoming particularly well-regarded as a director of
soap operas. His subsequent credits included Casualty,
Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Holby City.

In 2011, Andrew Cartmel shepherded a Big Finish
Productions audio series focussing on the unmade 1990 season

During the summer of 1989, Andrew Cartmel was offered a position as the
script editor of Casualty. In light of the uncertainty regarding
the future of Doctor Who, he decided to take this job for a
season. With the exception of a brief sojourn on the fantasy series
Dark Knight, Cartmel's career beyond Casualty lay outside
television. He wrote plays and toured as a stand-up comic. He authored
several original novels beginning with The Wise in 1999, and also
contributed to tie-in ranges for Judge Dredd and The
Prisoner. But Cartmel often returned to the world of Doctor
Who, principally as a novelist for Virgin, BBC Books and Telos
Publishing, starting with Cat's Cradle: Warhead for Doctor Who:
The New Adventures in 1992. Cartmel also wrote a 2000 audio for Big
Finish entitled Winter For The Adept, and returned to the company
in 2011 to shepherd a run of Doctor Who: The Lost Stories which
focussed on ideas originally developed for the programme's unmade 1990
season.

As Doctor Who celebrated its twenty-sixth anniversary on November
23rd, BBC Head of Serials Peter Cregeen confirmed in the pages of the
Radio Times that fans could expect a longer-than-usual wait
before Season Twenty-Seven entered production -- although he vowed that
Doctor Who had not been cancelled. For several years thereafter,
however, these words rang hollow. Sylvester McCoy now assumed that his
time as the Seventh Doctor had come to an end. John Nathan-Turner was
adamant that he had produced his final episode of Doctor Who for
television, and indeed left the BBC on August 31st, 1990 to become a
freelancer in charge of his own production company. As it turned out,
both men were mistaken...